Building an Honors Education for the Twenty-First Century: Making Connections In and Outside the Classroom

When I was sifting through stacks of brochures from colleges as a high school student (in the days before the Internet and college web sites), I had a vague sense that I wanted to find a college with an honors program in which it was “cool” for students to develop close mentoring relationships with faculty and where students were encouraged to seek both breadth and depth in their education. While I enjoyed my public high school experience, I knew that I wanted to go beyond memorizing facts and preparing for standardized tests. I could not fully articulate my educational goals or the reasons for them at that time, but in hindsight I realize that I was seeking a significant opportunity to participate in an environment marked by high-impact learning practices, a focus on the big issues facing humanity, and lifelong learning. I had the good fortune to enjoy such a life-changing experience in college, and as a university president I now strive to create similar opportunities for the next generations of students

Building an Honors Education for the Twenty-First Century: Making Connections In and Outside the Classroom

When I was sifting through stacks of brochures from colleges as a high school student (in the days before the Internet and college web sites), I had a vague sense that I wanted to find a college with an honors program in which it was “cool” for students to develop close mentoring relationships with faculty and where students were encouraged to seek both breadth and depth in their education. While I enjoyed my public high school experience, I knew that I wanted to go beyond memorizing facts and preparing for standardized tests. I could not fully articulate my educational goals or the reasons for them at that time, but in hindsight I realize that I was seeking a significant opportunity to participate in an environment marked by high-impact learning practices, a focus on the big issues facing humanity, and lifelong learning. I had the good fortune to enjoy such a life-changing experience in college, and as a university president I now strive to create similar opportunities for the next generations of students

Unfinished Homework for Universities: Making the Case for Affirmative Action

The unfinished homework in the affirmative action debate concerns the development of an articulated vision-supported by a strong evidentiary basis-of the educational benefits of racial diversity in higher education

The evolution of early hominin food production and sharing

How did humans evolve from individualistic foraging to collective foraging with sex differences in food production and widespread sharing of plant and animal foods? While current models of food sharing focus on meat or cooking, considerations of the economics of foraging for extracted plant foods (e.g., roots, tubers), inferred to be important for earlier hominins (∼ 6–2.5 mya), suggest that hominins shared such foods. Here we present a conceptual and mathematical model of early hominin food production and sharing, prior to the emergence of frequent scavenging, hunting and cooking. We hypothesize that extracted plant foods were vulnerable to theft, and that male mate-guarding protected females from food theft. We identify conditions favoring plant food production and sharing across mating systems (i.e., monogamy, polygyny, promiscuity), and we assess which mating system maximizes female fitness with changes in the energetic profitability of extractive foraging. Females extract foods and share them with males only when: i) extracting rather than collecting plant foods pays off energetically; and ii) males guard females

Paternal provisioning results from ecological change

Paternal provisioning among humans is puzzling because it is rare among primates and absent in nonhuman apes and because emergent provisioning would have been subject to paternity theft. A provisioning “dad” loses fitness at the hands of nonprovisioning, mate-seeking “cads.” Recent models require exacting interplay between male provisioning and female choice to overcome this social dilemma. We instead posit that ecological change favored widespread improvements in male provisioning incentives, and we show theoretically how social obstacles to male provisioning can be overcome. Greater availability of energetically rich, difficult-to-acquire foods enhances female–male and male–male complementarities, thus altering the fitness of dads versus cads. We identify a tipping point where gains from provisioning overcome costs from paternity uncertainty and the dad strategy becomes viable. Stable polymorphic states are possible, meaning that dads need not necessarily eliminate cads. Our simulations suggest that with sufficient complementarities, dads can emerge even in the face of high paternity uncertainty. Our theoretical focus on ecological change as a primary factor affecting the trade-off between male mating and parenting effort suggests different possibilities for using paleo-climatic, archaeological, and genomic evidence to establish the timing of and conditions associated with emergence of paternal provisioning in the hominin lineage

Brief for Respondents, Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 US 306 (2003) (No. 02-241).

QUESTIONS PRESENTED 1. Whether this Court should reaffirm its decision in Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978) and hold that the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body to an institution of higher education, its students, and the public it serves, are sufficiently compelling to permit the school to consider race and/or ethnicity as one of many factors in making admissions decisions through a properly devised admissions program. 2. Whether the Court of Appeals correctly held that the University of Michigan Law School\u27s admissions program is properly devised

How to Recruit and Promote Minority Faculty: Start by Playing Fair

Sometimes, you have to review the rules of the game to make sure that you are applying them fairly to everyone. Recent legal attacks on affirmative action have made colleges and universities nervous about their efforts to recruit faculty (as well as students) from underrepresented minority groups. Special initiatives designed to attract minority faculty are of particular concern. The statistics on minority representation among tenuretrack faculty in many disciplines remain alarmingly low, however. At several recent conferences on these issues, I have been disappointed to hear deans and affirmative action officers express the belief that their own faculties often create the highest hurdles to minority faculty recruitment and retention. What can be done to ensure that the rules are fair and fairly applied? Before pursuing new programs that might be legally susceptible, faculty members should first examine how they currently evaluate candidates for appointment and promotion

The evolution of early hominin food production and sharing

National audienceHow did humans evolve from individualistic foraging to collective foraging with sex differences in food production and widespread sharing of plant and animal foods?While current models of food sharing focus on meat or cooking, considerations of the economics of foraging for extracted plant foods (e.g., roots, tubers), inferred to be important for earlier hominins (∼ 6–2.5 mya), suggest that hominins shared such foods. Here we present a conceptual and mathematical model of early hominin food production and sharing, prior to the emergence of frequent scavenging, hunting and cooking. We hypothesize that extracted plant foods were vulnerable to theft, and that male mate-guarding protected females from food theft. We identify conditions favoring plant food production and sharing across mating systems (i.e., monogamy, polygyny, promiscuity), and we assess which mating system maximizes female fitness with changes in the energetic profitability of extractive foraging. Females extract foods and share them with males only when: i) extracting rather than collecting plant foods pays off energetically; and ii) males guard females. Males extract foods whenever these are sufficiently high in value, but share with females only under promiscuous mating and/or no mate guarding. These results suggest that if early hominins had mating systems with pair-bonds (monogamous or polygynous), sharing of extracted plant foods by females occurred long before scavenging, hunting and cooking. Such cooperation may have enabled early hominins to expand into more open, seasonal habitats, and provided a foundation for the subsequent evolution of unique human life histories

Paternal provisioning results from ecological change

National audiencePaternal provisioning among humans is puzzling because it is rare among primates and absent in nonhuman apes and because emergent provisioning would have been subject to paternity theft. A provisioning “dad” loses fitness at the hands of nonprovisioning, mate-seeking “cads.” Recent models require exacting interplay between male provisioning and female choice to overcome this social dilemma. We instead posit that ecological change favored widespread improvements in male provisioning incentives, and we show theoretically how social obstacles to male provisioning can be overcome. Greater availability of energetically rich, difficult-to-acquire foods enhances female–male and male–male complementarities, thus altering the fitness of dads versus cads. We identify a tipping point where gains from provisioning overcome costs from paternity uncertainty and the dad strategy becomes viable. Stable polymorphic states are possible, meaning that dads need not necessarily eliminate cads. Our simulations suggest that with sufficient complementarities, dads can emerge even in the face of high paternity uncertainty. Our theoretical focus on ecological change as a primary factor affecting the trade-off between male mating and parenting effort suggests different possibilities for using paleo-climatic, archaeological, and genomic evidence to establish the timing of and conditions associated with emergence of paternal provisioning in the hominin lineage